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LANSING – Along Sycamore Creek, south of Potter Park Zoo, stands a white willow so massive that it s on the National Register of Champion Trees.
With a girth of 389 inches, the whopper willow dwarfs some of the other impressive old trees growing across the region, including a silver maple in Grand Ledge that s nearly 250 inches around and a 111-foot-tall eastern cottonwood in Lansing.
Both are also in the state Big Tree Register maintained by the Michigan Botanical Club, and the Big Tree Hunt contest is one way that scientists find trees like these. There s a lot of scientific value in knowing where these trees are located, said Ashley Laux, project forester for ReLeaf Michigan, an Ann Arbor-based nonprofit that works with communities to plant more trees. They can then be further studied for whether they have some sort of disease resistance or a certain type of genetic makeup that make them more resilient.